Limewire is for girls

According to Microsoft, that is. The software giant recently released a demographics prediction demonstration that lets you check out which gender and age is associated with wich search term. Microsoft does state that this demo does "not provide or display conclusive results; rather, they are designed or produce anecdotal information." Fair enough. It's still interesting to give it a spin and see what it can tell us about the state of the P2P world.

Turns out this world is very, very male. Big surpirse, I guess. There are some significant differences though. For one thing, Limewire really does have a very even audience. 54 percent of all searches for Limewire are done by men, 46 percent by women. Compare that to Bittorrent, which is 77 percent male. The whole Torrent world seems to be very male dominated, at least if we can believe Microsoft's little demo platform. Azureus also gets 77 percent, followed by uTorrent with 73 percent.

One could be tempted to make the case that early adopters and hardcore users are predominately male, whereas more established and well-known file sharing technologies are attracting users of both genders. Kazaa's 54 percent male audience and Morpheus' 57 percent seem to support that. But that doesn't really explain why DC++, which isn't exactly your mom's P2P tool of choice, gets a whopping 48 percent of its searches from female users. And Piolet, a service that also has never been that popular, is even dominated by a slight majority of 51 percent female users.

So why is this relevant? P2P companies like Azureus and Bittorrent will only be able to establish themselves aas legal download platforms if they reach beyond their core audience - unless of course they want to cash in on that audience ...

Finally, and just for fun, I did some searches to figure out who is visiting various P2P news sites. P2P Blog is about 61 percent male, which I can see being the case. P2Pnet ends up with 59 percent. Torrentfreak nets a slightly higher 64 percent, Zeropaid is at 67 percent. But the real frat house if the P2P world is Slyck.com. The site gets 89 percent of its search requests from a male audience.

Saul, do most of those college-based DC++ hubs still have those enormous share quotas? Because that would be quite significant.

It's one thing for the mmainstream college population to get used to sharing a song here and here - it's quite another for the mainstream to share 30 Gigabyte in order to get access to your local hub ...

"Saul, do most of those college-based DC++ hubs still have those enormous share quotas? Because that would be quite significant."

No. If any, it's generally a few gigabytes. The particular one I frequent had no quota for some time, and then required a 2GB share. It has a user base of 3200 nicks, with an average of 400+ online at any given time. Peak share was around 50TB I believe, with the averaging running between 20 and 30TB every day of the week.